Number 2.1.1
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
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THE PREMEDITATED
MURDER OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
THE PREMEDITATED
MURDER OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
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NOTES FROM
A DYING NATION
NUMBER TWO
A DYING NATION
NUMBER TWO
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..........What if there were literary evidence to help show just how and why it is that our nation is dying, is being allowed to die, before our very eyes—with nobody doing a single thing to stop it?
..........Well, there is such evidence—literary—and I'll get to it next time. First, though, I'd better take up the objections certain to arise from my saying that nobody is doing a single thing to stop the all-but-completed murder of our nation.
..........We are doing things! I hear one person shout. We do know what's going on! adds another. And a third: Everybody knows Bush and Cheney and Rice are traitors, murderers, and war criminals!
..........Yes, yes, and yes, I know. But I also know that nothing is happening and that—a fact even more grim—nothing is likely to happen that will keep our country from being destroyed forever, or from being destroyed, at least, to the point where restoration will necessitate bloodshed, suffering, and ruin not seen inside the U.S. since the Civil War.
..........Just what is it that's supposed to be happening right now, in this last week of March 2008, that could in any way have the least effect in causing the nation to do anything other than continue lying down as it awaits the completion of its murder?
..........Several million voices cry thunderously, The election! The election! The election!
..........But that is not a good answer. In fact, it's no answer at all. Those several million voices are the voices of people deeply deceived, people kept purposely in a state of horrifying ignorance by the corporate media, people who are living merely on hope (to put it nicely) or people (to put it more accurately) who are living not only by habit but who are living also in the most total state of blindness to and denial of the actualities of the social and political world they're living in that may ever have existed—at least on so large a scale—in the history of the world.
..........Just to name some of the most pressing subjects and issues not being mentioned, let alone talked about, in the presidential campaign or by the presidential candidates is to understand immediately a number of things of very great importance. It is to understand quickly, for example, 1) that all of the candidates are major, world-class, championship liars, their lying being done primarily by omission; that 2) all of the candidates are intent upon keeping the world's most pressing and vital truths out of the thoughts and minds of the American population for the reason that 3) the candidates are in the service not of that population but in the service, instead, of the enemies of that population; 4) that none of the candidates is free to raise for discussion any of these matters that are of greatest importance to the population, but, instead, they must function and behave as what they really are, namely, 5) bonded slaves to their corporate owners, forbidden to speak in the interest of the people but only in the short-term and monetary interest of the owners; and, finally, it is to understand that 6) if any of the candidates were to break rank and speak out on—let alone act upon—truths of the greatest interest to the people rather than to their corpo-government owners, the penalty would be assassination. Such a candidate, that is to say, would either be assassinated by being sidelined in the way that Eliot Spitzer was recently and summarily sidelined and politically destroyed, or he or she would be assassinated in the more literal way that Senator Paul Wellstone was assassinated for refusing, in 2002, to support the Iraq war.
..........That said, what are the issues that, lest the result be death literal or symbolic, must either be kept always and only on the dimmest and deepest perimeter of the public consciousness or, even better, removed from that shadowy cave altogether?
..........Well, there's the boist'rous ruin¹ of the criminally-driven and now collapsing economy, for one thing. In a column called "Taming the Beast" (and subheaded "Who's willing to take on Wall Street?"), Paul Krugman² just the other day remarked with great simplicity and directness that "We're now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn't."
..........Okay, so truth about economic collapse has to stay out of the picture. Can't talk about that and hope to wake up healthy the next morning (after all, that's exactly what Eliot Spitzer did when—on Valentine's day, no less, a nice touch—he attacked "predatory lending" in his famous Washington Post piece). And why not? Well, Patrice Greanville and Jason Miller, in "Hope, Change, and Pissing in the Wind," put it simply enough for anyone when they write that, whatever may be claimed or said or intoned by candidates like Obama, who seem to bring "hope," the truth is that "we are still stuck with a bourgeois democracy. Which means that despite all the rhetoric and mythologies about equality, freedom, meritocracy, opportunity, and a host of other lies that placate the masses and maintain the social order, the United States is a nation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich."
..........You can't dis the plutocrats, even when they're criminals. Correction: You can't tell the truth about the plutocrats, especially when they're criminals.
..........Americans, then, all the way through the laborious presidential campaigns that (because of their obvious utility as diversion from matters that matter) stretch out across ever-longer sweeps of the calendar; and on through that parched desert of the non-elections themselves; and then on through the vast wasteland of the new "administration"—Americans must be kept blind every minute of every day of every month of every year to the fundamental truth that their country is run and ruled by criminal plutocrats whose greatest and most despised and feared natural enemy is—yes, a conscious, informed, knowledgeable, thinking population.
..........And, asks a reader somewhere, "So what? What's the big deal? The populace have always been kept dumber than their leaders."
..........This sort of response makes me think of cancer, since its logic is parallel to this: "There's always been cancer, so what's the big deal? Let's quit the whole business of cancer research."
..........Let's even suppose that it may be true, that the populace have always been kept dumber than their leaders. Two points immediately arise: 1) That fact doesn't make it a good thing any more than cancer is a good thing; and 2) it's perfectly possible that the people' being kept dumber now is a worse or more dangerous matter than it was in the past.
..........It's perfectly easy to argue that Americans have been sold a bill of goods over and over again. Howard Zinn, for example, is one of those fond of the notion that the first such hoodwinking took place at the founding itself. It is "a fact long true about this country," he writes, "that, as Richard Hofstadter said: '[The U.S.] was . . .[ellipsis in original] a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes.'"
..........The founders, that is to say, were property-owning men of wealth, power, and privilege, and they set things up from the get-go in such a way so as to protect wealth, power, and privilege. Furthermore, the founders were, in Zinn's telling, most vile and sneaky about it indeed:
....................Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions
....................to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth
....................or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites.
....................This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something
....................more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group
....................found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device.
....................That device was the language of liberty and equality, which
....................could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against
....................England, without ending either slavery or inequality.³
..........Zinn's is an example of thinking that qualifies perfectly as coming straight from The Age of Simplification. For thinkers of this sort, like Zinn , it's both routine and perfectly okay to lay moral blame on figures from the historical past for the crime of holding attitudes that were part and parcel of that historical past. Jefferson and the other founders are thus morally blamed retroactively for having held attitudes and for having acted in accordance with attitudes of their day in regard to race, gender, wealth, property, and Eurocentrism.
..........Now, two problems immediately arise. Each has to do both with logic and, quite curiously, with a kind of righteousness that comes very near to malice. I'm going to number them.
Problem One:
..........The first problem is this: To place retroactive moral blame the way Zinn does is the equivalent, logically, of placing retroactive moral blame on those living in the mid-eighteenth century for not having prevented people from dying of typhoid or pneumonia.
..........Few would disagree, I'm sure, that those deaths by typhoid or pneumonia were and remain today deeply lamentable and powerfully undesirable. But what moral blame can conceivably—what moral blame can logically—be placed on the denizens of the revolutionary era for those deaths?
..........Since it's universally agreed that no moral blame can be placed in the typhoid and pneumonia case, what chopping of logic permits it to be placed in the case of attitudes that to us are admittedly backward and pernicious ones toward property, race, and gender, even though at the time of Jefferson and the founders they were customary?
..........Imputing moral blame retroactively in the way Zinn does here is a demonstration of one of the most pernicious abuses of historical thinking—pernicious because it assumes a superiority in the person living later in history over the person living earlier. This fallacious view of history both arises from blindness and in turn causes blindness, just as it also both arises from and causes pride, which is itself another form of blindness.
..........Here's a test. Who among us now is able to identify or perceive customs followed by us in our own present day that at some point in the future will be looked back upon as retrograde, unbelievable, and pernicious?
..........And a question. What kind of person do you expect would be more perceptive, insightful, or prescient in identifying habits or attitudes that we ourselves now follow by custom but that in future may be seen as backward and pernicious? Which would it more likely be, a person who considers him or herself superior to those in the past, or a person who doesn't?
..........Obviously, the superior-feeling person will be the less likely of the two kinds, not the more likely, to be perspicacious, insightful, self-analytical, and impartially studious of his or her own attitudes, behavior, or unquestioned and unexamined assumptions. A sense of superiority, like pride, is a closer of the eyes.
..........After all, if you look closely at what it is that Zinn's eyes are closed to in this case, the result makes for a significant discovery. As we've seen, Zinn ascribes only contemptible—not even a more realistic mixture of, say, contemptible and laudable—motives to the founders. And as a result, most superciliously, he writes that the fathers of the nation "found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device." They "found"? And what they found was a "device"? In trying to set up his case that the fathers were operating solely out of their own propertied self interest and out of no other, he trivializes the entire historical sweep of Enlightenment science, philosophy, and thought into the simple-minded notion of a "device" that was apparently lying around somewhere under a corner bench in some Boston or Philadelphia pub, a "device" that one of the founders happened to notice, bent down to pick up, looked at curiously, and remarked, "Voilà! Here's just the device that'll do the trick for our fake and duplicitous revolution!"
..........It's ludicrous, of course, a childish if not infantile trivialization of the entire and profound sweep of philosophic, literary, and political history that in fact brought into existence the very concepts of inalienable individual rights and of the justification for popular revolution against the institution of monarchy. True enough, those rights weren't at the time seen as extending to women, blacks, native Americans, and non-property holders, and thus were not so extended, an awful truth, in all the senses of that word.
..........For moralizing simplifiers like Zinn, however, it is alchemized into something other than an awful truth that exists as part of a complex and organically evolving history. Instead, it's made into an absolute, or, you could say, an absolute value. As soon as this has been done, history is no longer organic and evolving but something quite different.
..........Any absolute, after all, is and must be, by definition, inert. Given this fact, how would a person describe the concept of history as it exists in the mind of someone like Zinn? Well, you might think of a very long steel beam, wholly rigid, that's grasped firmly by the historian in such a manner that it extends both deeply back into the past and far forward into the future. The steel beam, obviously, represents the absolute value that is to be—how else to say it?—served by history. History, from this point on, must be partial instead of whole, and it must be inert instead of organic. The metaphor, however destructive you may find it, demonstrates the way that historical thinking, in our present age, the Age of Simplification, steps away from being real thought or thinking and becomes, instead, a form of zealotry. The thinker no longer arrives at conclusions based on the observation of all available relevant evidence—empiricism—but instead submits to his or her domination by a prior fixed idea, and, accordingly, cuts away or ignores all evidence except evidence that supports or seems to support the prior idea.
..........From whatever good intentions it first arose, this formation of "thought," being all but pandemic among the nation's "left-progressive" intellectuals, has done and continues to do enormous damage intellectually, academically, and politically. As the birth-parent of "identity politics," "multi-culturalism," the rage for "diversity" and other well-intended ills, it has had so thorough a fragmenting influence, and so thorough an emasculating one to the left, that there's no longer any political left left in the land. Moral feeling has replaced intellectual thinking, with the result that America's progressive left is now almost totally void of ideas—and therefore also of power. You can read issue after issue of the Progressive magazine, you can read issue after issue of the Progressive Populist, you can read issue after issue of The Nation—and still come away empty-handed, without any new sense or awareness of plan, policy, project, initiative, idea, or program that could or can or would or will reunite, strengthen, or re-ignite the doddering, fragmented, insipid, touchy-feely, ever-righteous left. You will come away, that is, with no sense of having been among the strong, but with the wholly dispiriting sense of having spent much more time than you ever might have wanted to among the kind and well-intentioned, yes—well, mainly—and the "anti-war," but also among the shallow, the toothless, the wan, the repetitive, the not-terribly-bright, and, above all-this being, among all their many varieties, the one hallmark shared by all—among the moralistic.
Problem Two:
..........Some way back, I said that two problems arose as soon as people began thinking (that is, began "thinking") in moral absolutes, and also when they began (as they couldn't help but do, being absolutists already) applying those moral absolutes retroactively in historical studies. I think we've covered the first problem well enough-that "thinking" of this kind is an inevitable creator of tremendous intellectual, cultural, and political destructiveness and impotence.
..........The second problem is no less destructive than the first, though it's a good deal more simple. The problem is this: Absolutism in thinking, and absolutism in historical thinking, isn't ruinous only in the ways we've already seen, but it's also ruinous to debate. Why? Because it isn't possible to debate with an absolutist.
..........Here's where we get some idea of where political correctness came from and how it took hold. "Political correctness," after all, is nothing other than absolutism practiced on very, very narrow grounds. And because it's absolutist—or you could say, because it's belief—it pays the least possible serious attention to empiricism in any manifestation or from any direction.
..........As a result, because political correctness is the same as zealotry, people like me get into trouble and make numbers of enemies. For an example of how this happens, since we've already looked at the founding fathers as treated in the Zinnian mode, let's turn to Shakespeare and consider him as treated in—well, let's pick the feminist mode.
..........Most people at some point have probably heard the charge made that Shakespeare is a misogynist and, even more likely, that Hamlet is a misogynistic play. To my own way of thinking, the charges are baseless and not worth going into. But what if I were to go about trying to refute them? Well, I could take one of two approaches, or both. And the result, either way, would not be a successful refutation on my part. Instead, the result would be that I myself would be charged with being a misogynist.
..........Why? Let's look and see. In the first of my two available approaches, I could read the play yet again, combing it for evidence of misogyny. Finding none, I would declare the play free of misogyny. My accuser, however, might counter with any of several observations about women in the play—that Gertrude is treated like a sex object, that she is made to appear slow and unintelligent, that Ophelia is treated like and spoken of as a sex object, and, worse, that she is abused despicably by a cruel and wholly unfeeling Hamlet. Her madness and wholly pointless death come about as a result of his monstrous cruelty. He, on the other hand, in his privileged male role and with his privileged male status, is permitted to go on and, through his male brilliance (or through his dumb luck, given him by the playwright because he's male), become the heroic savior of the kingdom.
..........Refutation? If this accuser in regard to Shakespeare is like Howard Zinn in regard to the founders, he or she will be "seeing" only part of Shakespeare, and will be seeing also only part or one aspect of Hamlet, just as Zinn "saw" only one side of the actually much more complex founders. Therefore? Therefore the "evidence" of misogyny "found" by the accuser will be the only evidence he or she is open to. As a consequence, any counter-arguments I might summon up will fall on deaf ears. I would be dealing, as in the case of Zinn, with an absolutist rather than an empiricist, a person who therefore feels free, like Zinn, to impose moral blame retroactively throughout history in disregard for historical custom or attitude. This person will be holding a steel beam just as Zinn did, though this beam, running from ancient past to indefinite future, will have stamped on it "Misogyny," whereas Zinn's had stamped on it "Power, Capital, and Property." Against the obduracy of my accuser's a-historicism—or his or her partial or inorganic historicism—no attempted explanation on my part of, say, the literary, theatrical, or stage conventions of the Elizabethan period, or of contemporary ideas about the Great Chain of Being, or about Shakespeare's perceived relation between macrocosm and microcosm—would avail.
..........No, what would happen instead is that my accuser would become increasingly baffled as to what conceivable reason or motive I might have that would drive me to defend a misogynist—unless—et voilà! but of course!—unless I myself were one of the very same as he.
..........And so we come back, unhappily, to our original question—who and where are they, these vitally and desperately needed people, the ones who are doing something, anything at all, to stop the all-but-completed murder of our nation?
..........It can't possibly be people like Howard Zinn, or like my hypothetical antagonist on the matter of Hamlet. It seems perfectly reasonable—doesn't it?—to think of those two as representative of the many millions of people who, more likely than not, would consider themselves as being somewhere within or near the "progressive left." If true, how terrible a thing it is to recognize that these people can't help us.
..........It's impossible to doubt that their thinking had its first roots in a commitment to the moral, the just, the right, and the fair. But—through the shaping of who knows how many other influences of how enormous a variety—the very strength of that commitment led them away from the historical and toward the a-historical; away from breadth, empiricism, and the organic and, as we've seen, toward the moral absolute. As a consequence of all this, their method of thinking is now narrow, rigid, fixed, moralistic, non-empirical, and powerless.
..........How shocked they would be, do you suppose, if someone were to point out to them that their way of thinking is the same as that of the Bush administration as described by the Downing Street Memo? Round pegs can go into square holes if one's zeal is sufficient to allow—or cause—a simple ignoring of squareness and of roundness, sort of like ignoring four-fifths of Enlightenment philosophy if the remaining one-fifth suits your agenda better. How did it go in the famous memo? War was wanted, so war there would be, with the result that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
..........How can it be that the political and intellectual depravity revealed by the Downing Street Memo failed to stir even a large enough proportion of the American population so as to generate at least a major showdown with the Bush administration and at best the early stage of an outright change in policy? "How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?" asks David Michael Green, and I'm afraid the answer to his question may be more devastating than any of us have ever quite dared imagine. I do know, as far as the famous memo goes, that the holier-than-thou—or the "more-sophisticatedly-informed-and-above-the-hysterical-fray-than-thou"—preening, parading, and generally pissy-snotty airs of all the Michael Kinsley's of the land ("No Smoking Gun") has more to do with high neurosis than plain stupidity, but clearly there must be more than enough of the latter to make it obvious by now that no one is going to come forward to help us, that no one is going to do anything at all to prevent the completion of the murder of the republic that began before 9/11, was triggered on 9/11, and that has been moving steadily forward step by death-dealing step ever since.
..........Back at the start of this piece, on the subject of what the presidential candidates, professional liars-by-omission, weren't talking about in the campaign, we got only as far as "Tamed Paul" Krugman's saying that "We're now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn't." It's doubtful that anyone reading these words—either the words of "Tamed Paul" or these of mine—needs a list of the candidates' lies-by-omission, although a simple list of words like "Antarctic ice," "famine," "depleted uranium," "genocide," "assassination," "Paul Wellstone," "police state," "dictatorship," "treason," "real ID," "torture," "Jose Padilla," "Bilderberg Group" "Jose Padilla" (yes, again), and "9/11"—a simple list of words along these lines could go far in exposing the criminal, treasonous, immoral absence of truth that is really the only significant thing that does exist in the presidential campaign.
..........The horror.
..........Whether the horror of the things that the U.S. does, the atrocities it commits, whether that horror or the horror of how infinitesimal a part of the American people know the least bit about it or care to know the least bit about it—which of these horrors is the greater is almost a moot point. Either way, the United States and its people now together constitute a nation that is—unqualifiedly—shameful, depraved, ruinous, heinous, genocidal, treasonous, inhuman, unfeeling, and criminal both nationally and globally.
..........And so we've got to talk about what to do.
..........First, don't vote—and, in emulation of Carolyn Baker, don't feel guilty or ashamed about it, but talk about it, explain to anyone who will listen why it is you're doing what you're doing—in other words, make them feel like the guilty ones for being stooges and patsies and push-overs and fools and voting for the very same corpo-fascists whom they undoubtedly claim to be opposed to and even believe they are opposed to. If you need some help and strength to follow through in this act of not voting, go back and read—and then re-read—Carolyn Baker's powerful essay from 2/14/08, "Celebrating Un-President's Day: Why I Will Not Vote for a President in 2008." And if you want a quick, pocket-sized list—something you can carry around to show to other people—of the requirements a candidate would have to meet if you were to vote for him or her,click here for Carolyn's excellent list of what candidates ought to know about and ought to be talking about. That list is followed by the two short quotes from another equally important essay of hers, "Food, Fuel, and Fascism: Their Election or Your Life?" Here's one. For the others, read the essay, or go to the list:
....................As the likelihood of famine escalates, as bankruptcies sky-
....................rocket and foreclosures surge beyond anything this nation
....................has seen since the Great Depression, as unemployment
....................becomes epidemic, as the dollar daily sets records for loss
....................in value, as banks fail, as the price of oil flies off the charts,
....................I can only marvel that anyone in the United States has the
....................slightest interest whatsoever in a presidential election. My
....................mind reels but recalls the terrified and traumatized pass-
....................engers on the decks of the Titanic, hallucinating and in
....................shock. Although we may be overwhelmed passengers on
....................a sinking ship, there are lifeboats. This is not quite the
....................same Titanic; we have options. So why would anyone
....................rearrange the deck chairs by putting any faith in a
....................presidential candidate?
..........Not voting will be hard enough a thing to do, so deeply and powerfully engrained in almost every American—certainly in me—is the fundamental idea that the vote is no trifling thing, but that the vote is almost sacred, that the vote is democracy.
..........Now, though, on the edge of the abyss where we stand looking down, the presidential vote is neither democracy itself nor does it have the least thing to do with democracy or with the democratic project. In truth, it has far, far more to do with treason and crime than it has to with anything even faintly related to democracy. To vote, now, is to be a patsy, a used and exploited fool who never quite gets what it is that's being done to him, or certainly not until it's too late. To participate in the enormous election fraud, sideshow, and diversionary fraud is, indeed, to "live out the definition of insanity" and is indeed "nothing less than blatantly illogical and irrational."
..........Not voting is a good start, but there are other important things to do that will feel, at least in the beginning, just as awkward, unnatural, backward, and wrongheaded as not voting is going to feel.
..........It's time, for example—far, far past time—to revolt against the fraudulence of the putative and pseudo "progressive left." It's time to revile and repudiate all that's using us while claiming to be serving us. Remember Sean Madden's "Open Letter to Amy Goodman"? Well, if you don't, now's the time to re-read it, and now's a good time also to memorize the excellent and revealing sentence in which Madden states the kernel of his accusation against Goodman: "You deign to give your goodhearted listener-viewer-readers the symptoms, never the fundamentals which would empower them."
..........In an email back in December 2007, I said something similar: "Progressives like Amy Goodman," I wrote, "hide behind the good they do in order to escape censure for the bad."
..........The same is true of Howard Zinn. The same is true of Joe Conason. The same is true, among many others, of David Corn, of Katrina vanden Heuvel, of Tom Engelhardt, Matthew Rothschild, Jacob Weisberg, Keith Olbermann, Michael Lerner, Christopher Hayes, Frank Rich, Arianna Huffington, Robert Silvers, Rodrigue Tremblay, Gene Lyons, Richard Posner, Leon Wieseltier, Thomas de Zengotita, and Noam Chomsky.
..........It's time to stop reading, or even being polite to, any of these people. It's time to stop reading, or tolerating, any of their publications, magazines, articles, or periodicals. It's time to stop watching any of their television appearances. It's time to declare all of these people to be what they are and to boycott and dismiss all of these people because of what they are.
..........And what are they? The answer is that they all—whether wittingly or unwittingly is impossible to say—work for the corpo-fascist government that began murdering the republic on 9/11 and that is now almost finished with the job it set out to do. They are all liars—again, whether wittingly or unwittingly is impossible to say—primarily but not only and by no means always, by omission. All of them—knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or effectively, wittingly or unwittingly—stand in the way of 9/11 truth's being revealed. They all are standing in the way of that truth's being correctly, properly, openly, ethically, and responsibly revealed, publicized, described, and made known. And if that truth is not made known in those ways, the republic will die, and, furthermore, it will be dead by inauguration day of 2009. On the other hand, if that truth is made known in those ways, and if it is made known soon enough, the republic, and we, the citizens of it, may survive.
..........Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out that what Nancy Pelosi and her party colleagues did after the 2006 election in taking impeachment "off the table" is parallel to what the Enabling Act accomplished for Hitler in 1933, releasing him from any accountability to or control by the Reichstag—just as Bush, as all who have eyes can see—has managed to escape control by congress.
..........It's an almost absolute certainty that every one of the people I listed three paragraphs above, if they were here now in person, would immediately ridicule the very idea of there being the least validity to any analogy of this kind between Bush and Hitler. They would be—wrong. Whether from criminal motives or motives of ignorance, they would be wrong. They would be like those of my students who, decade after decade, refused adamantly to accept the logic of any analogy unless it showed two things to be parallel not only in kind but also in degree. They would, for example, wholly reject my analogy that coming to class without remembering your textbook was like a soldier going into battle without remembering his rifle. Those students would not or could not—whether through refusal or inability was often impossible to say—see, understand, or accept any parallel between defending oneself against intellectual death and defending oneself against physical death. Period.
..........But they were wrong. And to reject the Bush-Hitler analogy on the grounds that the two criminals, even if parallel in kind, are not parallel in degree is also wrong, both as a matter of logic and as a matter of morality. Ask William Butler Yeats whether it's "more wrong" to murder two people than one, or four than two, and he might well read back to you his famous lines, from "Lapis Lazuli," about dying:
..............................All men have aimed at, found and lost;
..............................Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
..............................Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
..............................Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
..............................And all the drop-scenes drop at once
..............................Upon a hundred thousand stages,
..............................It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
..........Whatever her motives, or whether she even knows them or not, Nancy Pelosi, precisely like the people I cited above, is, whether wittingly or unwittingly, an aider and abettor of the traitors and criminals engaged in the murder of the republic of the United States. Here is part of what Paul Craig Roberts said in "How Republicans Created Executive Branch Hegemony":
....................White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former
....................White House counsel Harriet Miers were found in con-
....................tempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas
....................and refusing to cooperate with congressional committee
....................investigations of the Bush Regime's political firings of
....................eight Republican US attorneys. The eight fired US
....................attorneys declined to politicize their offices by investigat-
....................ing only Democratic officials and ruining their election
....................chances with leaks from "investigations" designed
....................to smear their reputations.
....................Mukasey gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the
....................majority Democrats in Congress the finger and refused
....................to refer the House of Representatives charges against
....................the two Bush Regime operatives to a federal grand
....................jury for investigation. Following the now established
....................practice by the Bush Regime, Mukasey told the
....................speaker of the House that members of the executive
....................branch are above the law and are not accountable
....................to the US Congress, formerly a co-equal branch of
....................government under the US Constitution in the days
....................now past when the executive branch felt obliged to
....................abide by the Constitution.
..........The especially pertinent—and ominous—phrase in any consideration of the Bush-Hitler analogy, of course, is the innocent sounding "formerly a co-equal branch of government." Roberts adds: "The way matters stand in America today, the executive branch can falsely prosecute, frame-up, and imprison members of Congress and governors of states at will, but itself cannot be held accountable to law."
..........How did—how could—such a situation come about? Here? In the United States?
....................Pelosi herself was instrumental in making the executive
....................branch unaccountable to Congress or to law when she
....................declared impeachment of Bush to be "off the table." This
....................declaration by the speaker of the House has effectively
....................released the Bush Regime from any accountability, just
....................as the Enabling Act released Hitler from any accountab-
....................ility to the Reichstag, the German constitution, or stat-
....................utory law.
..........Those who so choose are free to reject the analogy, to declare it invalid. It seems to me, however, that doing that is in effect to join the side of treason, to join those willing to see the Constitution be abandoned, and in fact those willing to aid in its abandonment.
..........How much more plainly can it be put, the sheer enormity of what's happening? Here are three more sentences from the Paul Craig Roberts piece:
....................The Bush Regime, with the complicity of Congress
....................and the judiciary, has destroyed the American con-
....................stitutional system. For the Brownshirt Republicans
....................only THE AGENDA is important. Law, Constitution,
....................separation of powers, truth, decency, honor—all of
....................these things and any others in the way of THE AGENDA
....................are dispensable.
..................................................·
....................If a regime that has come to be despised and de-
....................plored by a majority of Americans and the world can
....................ride roughshod over law and the Constitution, consti-
....................tutional government obviously has no future
....................in America.
..................................................·
....................The only power the House has left is impeachment, and
....................Pelosi is too frightened to use it.
..................................................·
..........Even Roberts, this powerful, courageous, dedicated patriot, sometimes pulls back a little, wincing, as though he, too, can scarcely bear to see, describe, and name—or admit—the treason and criminality that are right there, hidden in plain sight, out in the open. Maybe this is why he suggests first that Pelosi is "complicit" and later that she is "frightened." In murder, however, the crime is murder. The crime remains unchanged whether the murderer is frightened or not.
..........And murder it will be, of the republic, if something isn't done fast to prevent it—and at this point we return to the matter of the elections. What's all-important about the elections, once again, is that they will make no difference whatsoever in anything.
..........People want to believe, as we've seen all too well and all too clearly, that the elections have meaning. But they do not. They are empty. They are hollow. They are corporate-owned. They cannot make any difference.
..........Nothing can make any difference except taking back the power that has been stolen by the traitors and murderers who either constitute or govern the Bush administration.
..........Impeachment has got to happen—soon—or we're goners.
..........Roberts himself points out—and I add the emphasis—that "the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney—indeed the entire administration—is by far the most powerful and necessary case for impeachment that has ever existed."
..........There's the truly important, the historic, phrase: "that has ever existed."
..........And here's the rest of Roberts' sentence, again with my own emphasis:
....................By declaring Bush unimpeachable, Pelosi is giving away
....................Congress' only remaining power to prevent tyrannical rule
....................by the executive branch. If Bush is above impeachment,
....................every future president will be as well.
..........The phrase of greatest importance this time, or, let's say, the sentence of greatest importance, is this true, and truly horrifying one:
....................If Bush is above impeachment, every future president will
....................be as well.
..........Unless Congress—the branch of the people—is once again made "a co-equal branch of government" before the inauguration of 2009, the democratic republic of the United States of America will have ceased to exist forever. That means that impeachment must take place before then. And that means, as I said before, that, in order to start the impeachment movement and make it impossible to stop, the truth about the events of 9/11 must be correctly, properly, openly, ethically, and responsibly revealed, publicized, described, and made known.
..........The truth about the events of 9/11 no longer has anything whatsoever to do with "conspiracy theory" or any other such fraudulent and diversionary red herring, but it has only to do with history.
..........So much scholarship has been done on 9/11, so much has been written, demonstrated, revealed, and shown about it, about the crucial and relevant events preceding it, about the tactical and strategic origins of the plot, about the precise manner of its execution, about the long and causative political history preceding it, and about the deliberate and intentional means by which the truth about the events of that day has been and remains suppressed and covered up—so much evidence has been accumulated and so much scholarship has been completed and written, including scientific scholarship, that any American citizen with the least iota of political conscience, with the least sense of civic responsibility, with the least possession of independence, free agency, and intellectual curiosity, and with the least desire to bequeath to their children and to their children's children a place and a way to live other than under torture, other than in chains, and other than in hunger—any such American citizen who still adheres to the government's seven-year-long chain of continuous and contemptible lies about what really happened on 9/11 is either a fool, a complete non-entity socio-politically, or a party to the cover-up and thus to treason.
..........Or unbelieving and scared to death.
..........Be strong, be courageous, and urge others to follow in the same manner. Carry around with you copies of Carolyn Baker's list and her quotes so you can hand them out to people. Begin following Online Journal all the time, and the same for Information Clearing House, where you'll find real news and commentary, along with a great deal of good company to hearten you in the cause. You may even find yourself donating to those extraordinary online publications. Be sure to read the powerfully truth-telling essay by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "There Is No 'War on Terror.'" And do the same with Richard W. Behan's "Democrats: Impeach, or Face Humiliation in November."
..........They will both be tonic, I assure you.
..........Stick with the real real. Stick with the truth. Expose the lies. Here's a quote from Behan:
....................Successful deconstruction [of the "official" 9/11 story]
....................can be done only with an abrupt, even explosive erup-
....................tion of truth, done in full view of the mass media.
..........That's the aim, however difficult. But to it I say let's get going—time has never been shorter.
..........
.......... ..........
......................................................................—Eric Larsen
......................................................................—April 1, 2008
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¹.........."The single and peculiar life is bound, / With all the strength and armor of the mind, / To keep itself from noyance; but much more / That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests / The lives of many. The cess of majesty / Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw / What's near it with it; or 'tis a massy wheel, / Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, / To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things / Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls, / Each small annexment, petty consequence, / Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone / Did the king sigh, but with a general groan." Hamlet, III, iii, 16-23.
²..........I have adopted the nickname "Tamed Paul" for Krugman. Years ago, he sometimes wrote the truth with a directness that came close to delivering what I call "real reality," like back in 2004 when he wrote that "What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public." Tamed Paul has been far, far more muted in the four years since those words appeared—on April 27, 2004.
³..........A People's History of the United States, pp. 57-58.
1
The Unseen, the Unsaid, the Unknown
The Unseen, the Unsaid, the Unknown
..........What if there were literary evidence to help show just how and why it is that our nation is dying, is being allowed to die, before our very eyes—with nobody doing a single thing to stop it?
..........Well, there is such evidence—literary—and I'll get to it next time. First, though, I'd better take up the objections certain to arise from my saying that nobody is doing a single thing to stop the all-but-completed murder of our nation.
..........We are doing things! I hear one person shout. We do know what's going on! adds another. And a third: Everybody knows Bush and Cheney and Rice are traitors, murderers, and war criminals!
..........Yes, yes, and yes, I know. But I also know that nothing is happening and that—a fact even more grim—nothing is likely to happen that will keep our country from being destroyed forever, or from being destroyed, at least, to the point where restoration will necessitate bloodshed, suffering, and ruin not seen inside the U.S. since the Civil War.
..........Just what is it that's supposed to be happening right now, in this last week of March 2008, that could in any way have the least effect in causing the nation to do anything other than continue lying down as it awaits the completion of its murder?
..........Several million voices cry thunderously, The election! The election! The election!
..........But that is not a good answer. In fact, it's no answer at all. Those several million voices are the voices of people deeply deceived, people kept purposely in a state of horrifying ignorance by the corporate media, people who are living merely on hope (to put it nicely) or people (to put it more accurately) who are living not only by habit but who are living also in the most total state of blindness to and denial of the actualities of the social and political world they're living in that may ever have existed—at least on so large a scale—in the history of the world.
..........Just to name some of the most pressing subjects and issues not being mentioned, let alone talked about, in the presidential campaign or by the presidential candidates is to understand immediately a number of things of very great importance. It is to understand quickly, for example, 1) that all of the candidates are major, world-class, championship liars, their lying being done primarily by omission; that 2) all of the candidates are intent upon keeping the world's most pressing and vital truths out of the thoughts and minds of the American population for the reason that 3) the candidates are in the service not of that population but in the service, instead, of the enemies of that population; 4) that none of the candidates is free to raise for discussion any of these matters that are of greatest importance to the population, but, instead, they must function and behave as what they really are, namely, 5) bonded slaves to their corporate owners, forbidden to speak in the interest of the people but only in the short-term and monetary interest of the owners; and, finally, it is to understand that 6) if any of the candidates were to break rank and speak out on—let alone act upon—truths of the greatest interest to the people rather than to their corpo-government owners, the penalty would be assassination. Such a candidate, that is to say, would either be assassinated by being sidelined in the way that Eliot Spitzer was recently and summarily sidelined and politically destroyed, or he or she would be assassinated in the more literal way that Senator Paul Wellstone was assassinated for refusing, in 2002, to support the Iraq war.
..........That said, what are the issues that, lest the result be death literal or symbolic, must either be kept always and only on the dimmest and deepest perimeter of the public consciousness or, even better, removed from that shadowy cave altogether?
..........Well, there's the boist'rous ruin¹ of the criminally-driven and now collapsing economy, for one thing. In a column called "Taming the Beast" (and subheaded "Who's willing to take on Wall Street?"), Paul Krugman² just the other day remarked with great simplicity and directness that "We're now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn't."
..........Okay, so truth about economic collapse has to stay out of the picture. Can't talk about that and hope to wake up healthy the next morning (after all, that's exactly what Eliot Spitzer did when—on Valentine's day, no less, a nice touch—he attacked "predatory lending" in his famous Washington Post piece). And why not? Well, Patrice Greanville and Jason Miller, in "Hope, Change, and Pissing in the Wind," put it simply enough for anyone when they write that, whatever may be claimed or said or intoned by candidates like Obama, who seem to bring "hope," the truth is that "we are still stuck with a bourgeois democracy. Which means that despite all the rhetoric and mythologies about equality, freedom, meritocracy, opportunity, and a host of other lies that placate the masses and maintain the social order, the United States is a nation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich."
..........You can't dis the plutocrats, even when they're criminals. Correction: You can't tell the truth about the plutocrats, especially when they're criminals.
..........Americans, then, all the way through the laborious presidential campaigns that (because of their obvious utility as diversion from matters that matter) stretch out across ever-longer sweeps of the calendar; and on through that parched desert of the non-elections themselves; and then on through the vast wasteland of the new "administration"—Americans must be kept blind every minute of every day of every month of every year to the fundamental truth that their country is run and ruled by criminal plutocrats whose greatest and most despised and feared natural enemy is—yes, a conscious, informed, knowledgeable, thinking population.
2
The Untrue
(A Note on History)
The Untrue
(A Note on History)
..........And, asks a reader somewhere, "So what? What's the big deal? The populace have always been kept dumber than their leaders."
..........This sort of response makes me think of cancer, since its logic is parallel to this: "There's always been cancer, so what's the big deal? Let's quit the whole business of cancer research."
..........Let's even suppose that it may be true, that the populace have always been kept dumber than their leaders. Two points immediately arise: 1) That fact doesn't make it a good thing any more than cancer is a good thing; and 2) it's perfectly possible that the people' being kept dumber now is a worse or more dangerous matter than it was in the past.
..........It's perfectly easy to argue that Americans have been sold a bill of goods over and over again. Howard Zinn, for example, is one of those fond of the notion that the first such hoodwinking took place at the founding itself. It is "a fact long true about this country," he writes, "that, as Richard Hofstadter said: '[The U.S.] was . . .[ellipsis in original] a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes.'"
..........The founders, that is to say, were property-owning men of wealth, power, and privilege, and they set things up from the get-go in such a way so as to protect wealth, power, and privilege. Furthermore, the founders were, in Zinn's telling, most vile and sneaky about it indeed:
....................Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions
....................to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth
....................or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites.
....................This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something
....................more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group
....................found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device.
....................That device was the language of liberty and equality, which
....................could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against
....................England, without ending either slavery or inequality.³
..........Zinn's is an example of thinking that qualifies perfectly as coming straight from The Age of Simplification. For thinkers of this sort, like Zinn , it's both routine and perfectly okay to lay moral blame on figures from the historical past for the crime of holding attitudes that were part and parcel of that historical past. Jefferson and the other founders are thus morally blamed retroactively for having held attitudes and for having acted in accordance with attitudes of their day in regard to race, gender, wealth, property, and Eurocentrism.
..........Now, two problems immediately arise. Each has to do both with logic and, quite curiously, with a kind of righteousness that comes very near to malice. I'm going to number them.
Problem One:
..........The first problem is this: To place retroactive moral blame the way Zinn does is the equivalent, logically, of placing retroactive moral blame on those living in the mid-eighteenth century for not having prevented people from dying of typhoid or pneumonia.
..........Few would disagree, I'm sure, that those deaths by typhoid or pneumonia were and remain today deeply lamentable and powerfully undesirable. But what moral blame can conceivably—what moral blame can logically—be placed on the denizens of the revolutionary era for those deaths?
..........Since it's universally agreed that no moral blame can be placed in the typhoid and pneumonia case, what chopping of logic permits it to be placed in the case of attitudes that to us are admittedly backward and pernicious ones toward property, race, and gender, even though at the time of Jefferson and the founders they were customary?
..........Imputing moral blame retroactively in the way Zinn does here is a demonstration of one of the most pernicious abuses of historical thinking—pernicious because it assumes a superiority in the person living later in history over the person living earlier. This fallacious view of history both arises from blindness and in turn causes blindness, just as it also both arises from and causes pride, which is itself another form of blindness.
..........Here's a test. Who among us now is able to identify or perceive customs followed by us in our own present day that at some point in the future will be looked back upon as retrograde, unbelievable, and pernicious?
..........And a question. What kind of person do you expect would be more perceptive, insightful, or prescient in identifying habits or attitudes that we ourselves now follow by custom but that in future may be seen as backward and pernicious? Which would it more likely be, a person who considers him or herself superior to those in the past, or a person who doesn't?
..........Obviously, the superior-feeling person will be the less likely of the two kinds, not the more likely, to be perspicacious, insightful, self-analytical, and impartially studious of his or her own attitudes, behavior, or unquestioned and unexamined assumptions. A sense of superiority, like pride, is a closer of the eyes.
..........After all, if you look closely at what it is that Zinn's eyes are closed to in this case, the result makes for a significant discovery. As we've seen, Zinn ascribes only contemptible—not even a more realistic mixture of, say, contemptible and laudable—motives to the founders. And as a result, most superciliously, he writes that the fathers of the nation "found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device." They "found"? And what they found was a "device"? In trying to set up his case that the fathers were operating solely out of their own propertied self interest and out of no other, he trivializes the entire historical sweep of Enlightenment science, philosophy, and thought into the simple-minded notion of a "device" that was apparently lying around somewhere under a corner bench in some Boston or Philadelphia pub, a "device" that one of the founders happened to notice, bent down to pick up, looked at curiously, and remarked, "Voilà! Here's just the device that'll do the trick for our fake and duplicitous revolution!"
..........It's ludicrous, of course, a childish if not infantile trivialization of the entire and profound sweep of philosophic, literary, and political history that in fact brought into existence the very concepts of inalienable individual rights and of the justification for popular revolution against the institution of monarchy. True enough, those rights weren't at the time seen as extending to women, blacks, native Americans, and non-property holders, and thus were not so extended, an awful truth, in all the senses of that word.
..........For moralizing simplifiers like Zinn, however, it is alchemized into something other than an awful truth that exists as part of a complex and organically evolving history. Instead, it's made into an absolute, or, you could say, an absolute value. As soon as this has been done, history is no longer organic and evolving but something quite different.
..........Any absolute, after all, is and must be, by definition, inert. Given this fact, how would a person describe the concept of history as it exists in the mind of someone like Zinn? Well, you might think of a very long steel beam, wholly rigid, that's grasped firmly by the historian in such a manner that it extends both deeply back into the past and far forward into the future. The steel beam, obviously, represents the absolute value that is to be—how else to say it?—served by history. History, from this point on, must be partial instead of whole, and it must be inert instead of organic. The metaphor, however destructive you may find it, demonstrates the way that historical thinking, in our present age, the Age of Simplification, steps away from being real thought or thinking and becomes, instead, a form of zealotry. The thinker no longer arrives at conclusions based on the observation of all available relevant evidence—empiricism—but instead submits to his or her domination by a prior fixed idea, and, accordingly, cuts away or ignores all evidence except evidence that supports or seems to support the prior idea.
..........From whatever good intentions it first arose, this formation of "thought," being all but pandemic among the nation's "left-progressive" intellectuals, has done and continues to do enormous damage intellectually, academically, and politically. As the birth-parent of "identity politics," "multi-culturalism," the rage for "diversity" and other well-intended ills, it has had so thorough a fragmenting influence, and so thorough an emasculating one to the left, that there's no longer any political left left in the land. Moral feeling has replaced intellectual thinking, with the result that America's progressive left is now almost totally void of ideas—and therefore also of power. You can read issue after issue of the Progressive magazine, you can read issue after issue of the Progressive Populist, you can read issue after issue of The Nation—and still come away empty-handed, without any new sense or awareness of plan, policy, project, initiative, idea, or program that could or can or would or will reunite, strengthen, or re-ignite the doddering, fragmented, insipid, touchy-feely, ever-righteous left. You will come away, that is, with no sense of having been among the strong, but with the wholly dispiriting sense of having spent much more time than you ever might have wanted to among the kind and well-intentioned, yes—well, mainly—and the "anti-war," but also among the shallow, the toothless, the wan, the repetitive, the not-terribly-bright, and, above all-this being, among all their many varieties, the one hallmark shared by all—among the moralistic.
Problem Two:
..........Some way back, I said that two problems arose as soon as people began thinking (that is, began "thinking") in moral absolutes, and also when they began (as they couldn't help but do, being absolutists already) applying those moral absolutes retroactively in historical studies. I think we've covered the first problem well enough-that "thinking" of this kind is an inevitable creator of tremendous intellectual, cultural, and political destructiveness and impotence.
..........The second problem is no less destructive than the first, though it's a good deal more simple. The problem is this: Absolutism in thinking, and absolutism in historical thinking, isn't ruinous only in the ways we've already seen, but it's also ruinous to debate. Why? Because it isn't possible to debate with an absolutist.
..........Here's where we get some idea of where political correctness came from and how it took hold. "Political correctness," after all, is nothing other than absolutism practiced on very, very narrow grounds. And because it's absolutist—or you could say, because it's belief—it pays the least possible serious attention to empiricism in any manifestation or from any direction.
..........As a result, because political correctness is the same as zealotry, people like me get into trouble and make numbers of enemies. For an example of how this happens, since we've already looked at the founding fathers as treated in the Zinnian mode, let's turn to Shakespeare and consider him as treated in—well, let's pick the feminist mode.
..........Most people at some point have probably heard the charge made that Shakespeare is a misogynist and, even more likely, that Hamlet is a misogynistic play. To my own way of thinking, the charges are baseless and not worth going into. But what if I were to go about trying to refute them? Well, I could take one of two approaches, or both. And the result, either way, would not be a successful refutation on my part. Instead, the result would be that I myself would be charged with being a misogynist.
..........Why? Let's look and see. In the first of my two available approaches, I could read the play yet again, combing it for evidence of misogyny. Finding none, I would declare the play free of misogyny. My accuser, however, might counter with any of several observations about women in the play—that Gertrude is treated like a sex object, that she is made to appear slow and unintelligent, that Ophelia is treated like and spoken of as a sex object, and, worse, that she is abused despicably by a cruel and wholly unfeeling Hamlet. Her madness and wholly pointless death come about as a result of his monstrous cruelty. He, on the other hand, in his privileged male role and with his privileged male status, is permitted to go on and, through his male brilliance (or through his dumb luck, given him by the playwright because he's male), become the heroic savior of the kingdom.
..........Refutation? If this accuser in regard to Shakespeare is like Howard Zinn in regard to the founders, he or she will be "seeing" only part of Shakespeare, and will be seeing also only part or one aspect of Hamlet, just as Zinn "saw" only one side of the actually much more complex founders. Therefore? Therefore the "evidence" of misogyny "found" by the accuser will be the only evidence he or she is open to. As a consequence, any counter-arguments I might summon up will fall on deaf ears. I would be dealing, as in the case of Zinn, with an absolutist rather than an empiricist, a person who therefore feels free, like Zinn, to impose moral blame retroactively throughout history in disregard for historical custom or attitude. This person will be holding a steel beam just as Zinn did, though this beam, running from ancient past to indefinite future, will have stamped on it "Misogyny," whereas Zinn's had stamped on it "Power, Capital, and Property." Against the obduracy of my accuser's a-historicism—or his or her partial or inorganic historicism—no attempted explanation on my part of, say, the literary, theatrical, or stage conventions of the Elizabethan period, or of contemporary ideas about the Great Chain of Being, or about Shakespeare's perceived relation between macrocosm and microcosm—would avail.
..........No, what would happen instead is that my accuser would become increasingly baffled as to what conceivable reason or motive I might have that would drive me to defend a misogynist—unless—et voilà! but of course!—unless I myself were one of the very same as he.
3
The Horror
The Horror
..........And so we come back, unhappily, to our original question—who and where are they, these vitally and desperately needed people, the ones who are doing something, anything at all, to stop the all-but-completed murder of our nation?
..........It can't possibly be people like Howard Zinn, or like my hypothetical antagonist on the matter of Hamlet. It seems perfectly reasonable—doesn't it?—to think of those two as representative of the many millions of people who, more likely than not, would consider themselves as being somewhere within or near the "progressive left." If true, how terrible a thing it is to recognize that these people can't help us.
..........It's impossible to doubt that their thinking had its first roots in a commitment to the moral, the just, the right, and the fair. But—through the shaping of who knows how many other influences of how enormous a variety—the very strength of that commitment led them away from the historical and toward the a-historical; away from breadth, empiricism, and the organic and, as we've seen, toward the moral absolute. As a consequence of all this, their method of thinking is now narrow, rigid, fixed, moralistic, non-empirical, and powerless.
..........How shocked they would be, do you suppose, if someone were to point out to them that their way of thinking is the same as that of the Bush administration as described by the Downing Street Memo? Round pegs can go into square holes if one's zeal is sufficient to allow—or cause—a simple ignoring of squareness and of roundness, sort of like ignoring four-fifths of Enlightenment philosophy if the remaining one-fifth suits your agenda better. How did it go in the famous memo? War was wanted, so war there would be, with the result that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
..........How can it be that the political and intellectual depravity revealed by the Downing Street Memo failed to stir even a large enough proportion of the American population so as to generate at least a major showdown with the Bush administration and at best the early stage of an outright change in policy? "How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?" asks David Michael Green, and I'm afraid the answer to his question may be more devastating than any of us have ever quite dared imagine. I do know, as far as the famous memo goes, that the holier-than-thou—or the "more-sophisticatedly-informed-and-above-the-hysterical-fray-than-thou"—preening, parading, and generally pissy-snotty airs of all the Michael Kinsley's of the land ("No Smoking Gun") has more to do with high neurosis than plain stupidity, but clearly there must be more than enough of the latter to make it obvious by now that no one is going to come forward to help us, that no one is going to do anything at all to prevent the completion of the murder of the republic that began before 9/11, was triggered on 9/11, and that has been moving steadily forward step by death-dealing step ever since.
..........Back at the start of this piece, on the subject of what the presidential candidates, professional liars-by-omission, weren't talking about in the campaign, we got only as far as "Tamed Paul" Krugman's saying that "We're now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn't." It's doubtful that anyone reading these words—either the words of "Tamed Paul" or these of mine—needs a list of the candidates' lies-by-omission, although a simple list of words like "Antarctic ice," "famine," "depleted uranium," "genocide," "assassination," "Paul Wellstone," "police state," "dictatorship," "treason," "real ID," "torture," "Jose Padilla," "Bilderberg Group" "Jose Padilla" (yes, again), and "9/11"—a simple list of words along these lines could go far in exposing the criminal, treasonous, immoral absence of truth that is really the only significant thing that does exist in the presidential campaign.
..........The horror.
..........Whether the horror of the things that the U.S. does, the atrocities it commits, whether that horror or the horror of how infinitesimal a part of the American people know the least bit about it or care to know the least bit about it—which of these horrors is the greater is almost a moot point. Either way, the United States and its people now together constitute a nation that is—unqualifiedly—shameful, depraved, ruinous, heinous, genocidal, treasonous, inhuman, unfeeling, and criminal both nationally and globally.
..........And so we've got to talk about what to do.
..........First, don't vote—and, in emulation of Carolyn Baker, don't feel guilty or ashamed about it, but talk about it, explain to anyone who will listen why it is you're doing what you're doing—in other words, make them feel like the guilty ones for being stooges and patsies and push-overs and fools and voting for the very same corpo-fascists whom they undoubtedly claim to be opposed to and even believe they are opposed to. If you need some help and strength to follow through in this act of not voting, go back and read—and then re-read—Carolyn Baker's powerful essay from 2/14/08, "Celebrating Un-President's Day: Why I Will Not Vote for a President in 2008." And if you want a quick, pocket-sized list—something you can carry around to show to other people—of the requirements a candidate would have to meet if you were to vote for him or her,click here for Carolyn's excellent list of what candidates ought to know about and ought to be talking about. That list is followed by the two short quotes from another equally important essay of hers, "Food, Fuel, and Fascism: Their Election or Your Life?" Here's one. For the others, read the essay, or go to the list:
....................As the likelihood of famine escalates, as bankruptcies sky-
....................rocket and foreclosures surge beyond anything this nation
....................has seen since the Great Depression, as unemployment
....................becomes epidemic, as the dollar daily sets records for loss
....................in value, as banks fail, as the price of oil flies off the charts,
....................I can only marvel that anyone in the United States has the
....................slightest interest whatsoever in a presidential election. My
....................mind reels but recalls the terrified and traumatized pass-
....................engers on the decks of the Titanic, hallucinating and in
....................shock. Although we may be overwhelmed passengers on
....................a sinking ship, there are lifeboats. This is not quite the
....................same Titanic; we have options. So why would anyone
....................rearrange the deck chairs by putting any faith in a
....................presidential candidate?
·..........·..........·..........·..........·
..........Not voting will be hard enough a thing to do, so deeply and powerfully engrained in almost every American—certainly in me—is the fundamental idea that the vote is no trifling thing, but that the vote is almost sacred, that the vote is democracy.
..........Now, though, on the edge of the abyss where we stand looking down, the presidential vote is neither democracy itself nor does it have the least thing to do with democracy or with the democratic project. In truth, it has far, far more to do with treason and crime than it has to with anything even faintly related to democracy. To vote, now, is to be a patsy, a used and exploited fool who never quite gets what it is that's being done to him, or certainly not until it's too late. To participate in the enormous election fraud, sideshow, and diversionary fraud is, indeed, to "live out the definition of insanity" and is indeed "nothing less than blatantly illogical and irrational."
..........Not voting is a good start, but there are other important things to do that will feel, at least in the beginning, just as awkward, unnatural, backward, and wrongheaded as not voting is going to feel.
..........It's time, for example—far, far past time—to revolt against the fraudulence of the putative and pseudo "progressive left." It's time to revile and repudiate all that's using us while claiming to be serving us. Remember Sean Madden's "Open Letter to Amy Goodman"? Well, if you don't, now's the time to re-read it, and now's a good time also to memorize the excellent and revealing sentence in which Madden states the kernel of his accusation against Goodman: "You deign to give your goodhearted listener-viewer-readers the symptoms, never the fundamentals which would empower them."
..........In an email back in December 2007, I said something similar: "Progressives like Amy Goodman," I wrote, "hide behind the good they do in order to escape censure for the bad."
..........The same is true of Howard Zinn. The same is true of Joe Conason. The same is true, among many others, of David Corn, of Katrina vanden Heuvel, of Tom Engelhardt, Matthew Rothschild, Jacob Weisberg, Keith Olbermann, Michael Lerner, Christopher Hayes, Frank Rich, Arianna Huffington, Robert Silvers, Rodrigue Tremblay, Gene Lyons, Richard Posner, Leon Wieseltier, Thomas de Zengotita, and Noam Chomsky.
..........It's time to stop reading, or even being polite to, any of these people. It's time to stop reading, or tolerating, any of their publications, magazines, articles, or periodicals. It's time to stop watching any of their television appearances. It's time to declare all of these people to be what they are and to boycott and dismiss all of these people because of what they are.
..........And what are they? The answer is that they all—whether wittingly or unwittingly is impossible to say—work for the corpo-fascist government that began murdering the republic on 9/11 and that is now almost finished with the job it set out to do. They are all liars—again, whether wittingly or unwittingly is impossible to say—primarily but not only and by no means always, by omission. All of them—knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or effectively, wittingly or unwittingly—stand in the way of 9/11 truth's being revealed. They all are standing in the way of that truth's being correctly, properly, openly, ethically, and responsibly revealed, publicized, described, and made known. And if that truth is not made known in those ways, the republic will die, and, furthermore, it will be dead by inauguration day of 2009. On the other hand, if that truth is made known in those ways, and if it is made known soon enough, the republic, and we, the citizens of it, may survive.
..........Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out that what Nancy Pelosi and her party colleagues did after the 2006 election in taking impeachment "off the table" is parallel to what the Enabling Act accomplished for Hitler in 1933, releasing him from any accountability to or control by the Reichstag—just as Bush, as all who have eyes can see—has managed to escape control by congress.
..........It's an almost absolute certainty that every one of the people I listed three paragraphs above, if they were here now in person, would immediately ridicule the very idea of there being the least validity to any analogy of this kind between Bush and Hitler. They would be—wrong. Whether from criminal motives or motives of ignorance, they would be wrong. They would be like those of my students who, decade after decade, refused adamantly to accept the logic of any analogy unless it showed two things to be parallel not only in kind but also in degree. They would, for example, wholly reject my analogy that coming to class without remembering your textbook was like a soldier going into battle without remembering his rifle. Those students would not or could not—whether through refusal or inability was often impossible to say—see, understand, or accept any parallel between defending oneself against intellectual death and defending oneself against physical death. Period.
..........But they were wrong. And to reject the Bush-Hitler analogy on the grounds that the two criminals, even if parallel in kind, are not parallel in degree is also wrong, both as a matter of logic and as a matter of morality. Ask William Butler Yeats whether it's "more wrong" to murder two people than one, or four than two, and he might well read back to you his famous lines, from "Lapis Lazuli," about dying:
..............................All men have aimed at, found and lost;
..............................Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
..............................Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
..............................Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
..............................And all the drop-scenes drop at once
..............................Upon a hundred thousand stages,
..............................It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
..........Whatever her motives, or whether she even knows them or not, Nancy Pelosi, precisely like the people I cited above, is, whether wittingly or unwittingly, an aider and abettor of the traitors and criminals engaged in the murder of the republic of the United States. Here is part of what Paul Craig Roberts said in "How Republicans Created Executive Branch Hegemony":
....................White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former
....................White House counsel Harriet Miers were found in con-
....................tempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas
....................and refusing to cooperate with congressional committee
....................investigations of the Bush Regime's political firings of
....................eight Republican US attorneys. The eight fired US
....................attorneys declined to politicize their offices by investigat-
....................ing only Democratic officials and ruining their election
....................chances with leaks from "investigations" designed
....................to smear their reputations.
....................Mukasey gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the
....................majority Democrats in Congress the finger and refused
....................to refer the House of Representatives charges against
....................the two Bush Regime operatives to a federal grand
....................jury for investigation. Following the now established
....................practice by the Bush Regime, Mukasey told the
....................speaker of the House that members of the executive
....................branch are above the law and are not accountable
....................to the US Congress, formerly a co-equal branch of
....................government under the US Constitution in the days
....................now past when the executive branch felt obliged to
....................abide by the Constitution.
..........The especially pertinent—and ominous—phrase in any consideration of the Bush-Hitler analogy, of course, is the innocent sounding "formerly a co-equal branch of government." Roberts adds: "The way matters stand in America today, the executive branch can falsely prosecute, frame-up, and imprison members of Congress and governors of states at will, but itself cannot be held accountable to law."
..........How did—how could—such a situation come about? Here? In the United States?
....................Pelosi herself was instrumental in making the executive
....................branch unaccountable to Congress or to law when she
....................declared impeachment of Bush to be "off the table." This
....................declaration by the speaker of the House has effectively
....................released the Bush Regime from any accountability, just
....................as the Enabling Act released Hitler from any accountab-
....................ility to the Reichstag, the German constitution, or stat-
....................utory law.
..........Those who so choose are free to reject the analogy, to declare it invalid. It seems to me, however, that doing that is in effect to join the side of treason, to join those willing to see the Constitution be abandoned, and in fact those willing to aid in its abandonment.
..........How much more plainly can it be put, the sheer enormity of what's happening? Here are three more sentences from the Paul Craig Roberts piece:
....................The Bush Regime, with the complicity of Congress
....................and the judiciary, has destroyed the American con-
....................stitutional system. For the Brownshirt Republicans
....................only THE AGENDA is important. Law, Constitution,
....................separation of powers, truth, decency, honor—all of
....................these things and any others in the way of THE AGENDA
....................are dispensable.
..................................................·
....................If a regime that has come to be despised and de-
....................plored by a majority of Americans and the world can
....................ride roughshod over law and the Constitution, consti-
....................tutional government obviously has no future
....................in America.
..................................................·
....................The only power the House has left is impeachment, and
....................Pelosi is too frightened to use it.
..................................................·
..........Even Roberts, this powerful, courageous, dedicated patriot, sometimes pulls back a little, wincing, as though he, too, can scarcely bear to see, describe, and name—or admit—the treason and criminality that are right there, hidden in plain sight, out in the open. Maybe this is why he suggests first that Pelosi is "complicit" and later that she is "frightened." In murder, however, the crime is murder. The crime remains unchanged whether the murderer is frightened or not.
..........And murder it will be, of the republic, if something isn't done fast to prevent it—and at this point we return to the matter of the elections. What's all-important about the elections, once again, is that they will make no difference whatsoever in anything.
..........People want to believe, as we've seen all too well and all too clearly, that the elections have meaning. But they do not. They are empty. They are hollow. They are corporate-owned. They cannot make any difference.
..........Nothing can make any difference except taking back the power that has been stolen by the traitors and murderers who either constitute or govern the Bush administration.
..........Impeachment has got to happen—soon—or we're goners.
..........Roberts himself points out—and I add the emphasis—that "the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney—indeed the entire administration—is by far the most powerful and necessary case for impeachment that has ever existed."
..........There's the truly important, the historic, phrase: "that has ever existed."
..........And here's the rest of Roberts' sentence, again with my own emphasis:
....................By declaring Bush unimpeachable, Pelosi is giving away
....................Congress' only remaining power to prevent tyrannical rule
....................by the executive branch. If Bush is above impeachment,
....................every future president will be as well.
..........The phrase of greatest importance this time, or, let's say, the sentence of greatest importance, is this true, and truly horrifying one:
....................If Bush is above impeachment, every future president will
....................be as well.
4
The End
The End
..........Unless Congress—the branch of the people—is once again made "a co-equal branch of government" before the inauguration of 2009, the democratic republic of the United States of America will have ceased to exist forever. That means that impeachment must take place before then. And that means, as I said before, that, in order to start the impeachment movement and make it impossible to stop, the truth about the events of 9/11 must be correctly, properly, openly, ethically, and responsibly revealed, publicized, described, and made known.
..........The truth about the events of 9/11 no longer has anything whatsoever to do with "conspiracy theory" or any other such fraudulent and diversionary red herring, but it has only to do with history.
..........So much scholarship has been done on 9/11, so much has been written, demonstrated, revealed, and shown about it, about the crucial and relevant events preceding it, about the tactical and strategic origins of the plot, about the precise manner of its execution, about the long and causative political history preceding it, and about the deliberate and intentional means by which the truth about the events of that day has been and remains suppressed and covered up—so much evidence has been accumulated and so much scholarship has been completed and written, including scientific scholarship, that any American citizen with the least iota of political conscience, with the least sense of civic responsibility, with the least possession of independence, free agency, and intellectual curiosity, and with the least desire to bequeath to their children and to their children's children a place and a way to live other than under torture, other than in chains, and other than in hunger—any such American citizen who still adheres to the government's seven-year-long chain of continuous and contemptible lies about what really happened on 9/11 is either a fool, a complete non-entity socio-politically, or a party to the cover-up and thus to treason.
..........Or unbelieving and scared to death.
..........Be strong, be courageous, and urge others to follow in the same manner. Carry around with you copies of Carolyn Baker's list and her quotes so you can hand them out to people. Begin following Online Journal all the time, and the same for Information Clearing House, where you'll find real news and commentary, along with a great deal of good company to hearten you in the cause. You may even find yourself donating to those extraordinary online publications. Be sure to read the powerfully truth-telling essay by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "There Is No 'War on Terror.'" And do the same with Richard W. Behan's "Democrats: Impeach, or Face Humiliation in November."
..........They will both be tonic, I assure you.
..........Stick with the real real. Stick with the truth. Expose the lies. Here's a quote from Behan:
....................Successful deconstruction [of the "official" 9/11 story]
....................can be done only with an abrupt, even explosive erup-
....................tion of truth, done in full view of the mass media.
..........That's the aim, however difficult. But to it I say let's get going—time has never been shorter.
..........
.......... ..........
......................................................................—Eric Larsen
......................................................................—April 1, 2008
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¹.........."The single and peculiar life is bound, / With all the strength and armor of the mind, / To keep itself from noyance; but much more / That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests / The lives of many. The cess of majesty / Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw / What's near it with it; or 'tis a massy wheel, / Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, / To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things / Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls, / Each small annexment, petty consequence, / Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone / Did the king sigh, but with a general groan." Hamlet, III, iii, 16-23.
²..........I have adopted the nickname "Tamed Paul" for Krugman. Years ago, he sometimes wrote the truth with a directness that came close to delivering what I call "real reality," like back in 2004 when he wrote that "What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public." Tamed Paul has been far, far more muted in the four years since those words appeared—on April 27, 2004.
³..........A People's History of the United States, pp. 57-58.